Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development

If you had to pick between an amazing product designer or an amazing engineer to build a new company around, which would you pick and why?

This question reflects a painful problem that is common at both small startups and large corporate organizations. Far too often, teams focus on execution before defining the product opportunity and unique value proposition. The result is a familiar set of symptoms including scope creep, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, frustrated teams and, ultimately, confused users. The root cause of these symptoms is the fact that execution focuses on the how and what of a product. But in a world where consumers are inundated with choices, products that want to be noticed and adopted must be rooted in the why.

A product is more than an idea, it's more than a website, and it's more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone's life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn't the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.

Who are the product storytellers? Part matchmaker, marketer, technologist, and artist, the product storytellers ask questions, find answers, and figure out how to distill a vision or idea into a product story. They develop a plot, identify the people, and shape the product around the specific values it should offer consumers. Product storytellers think about the whole, and they see the big picture. But they also can go deep because they understand that the product's true value lies in the details of its interactions and every touchpoint that a consumer has with it.

The first goal of a product storyteller is to facilitate collaboration and co-creation. Today, many companies have their product and marketing groups disconnected from each other. Marketing decisions are often made at the executive level—much higher than where product decisions are made. The result is that marketing tells one story, and the product tells a different story. In the end, consumers are left to put together the conflicting messages and try to determine why they should engage with the product. A product storyteller should be positioned in the company to help break down the walls between all groups, facilitate the development of a single story, foster collaboration between groups, and ensure that every interaction a consumer has with a product or brand maps back to that story.

Not only do product storytellers identify the intended product value, they also share and evangelize this story throughout their organizations. This is important because it ensures that the entire team understands the why behind what they are doing. A common understanding of the product story allows a team to incubate a shared vision. This vision turns into passion, and people with both passion and vision are more likely to produce products that others want to use. Without a firm understanding of the why, the team risks becoming task focused, losing sight of the big picture, and deflating any sense of empowerment or excitement that once existed. When this happens, consumers and the team feel the effects. Consumers experience a disconnected product and message and, as a result, don't have a clear perception of its value. Organizations and teams feel the effects through slow, little, or no product traction with consumers.

If one of the primary factors in consumer arousal, interest, and adoption of new products is the ability of the product to answer the question, "Why would I use this?" then why do so many teams either let execution come before defining the product value or allow multiple groups to do this independently? The answer is simple: the process of identifying a product opportunity and value statement is not easy and the skillset required is still coming of age.

We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers. We've moved from an economy built on people's backs to an economy built on people's left-brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people's right-brains.

Who are the right-brain thinkers? Through years of research, Pink has identified six aptitudes for the Conceptual Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Most relevant to us is the aptitude of story. Crafting stories is not about assembling facts. Instead, according to Pink, people who understand story have "the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact." The impact to story in business is that, "like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace." If you want your product to be heard by consumers, it must be rooted in a story that consumers can emotionally connect with.

The challenge today is that we face a shortage of storytellers because our current organizational structures and cultures are not optimized for the activities involved in storytelling. First, as I've already discussed, ownership of product value is not clearly defined and instead is distributed across or shared between teams. The result is a series of communication disconnects that produce a product experience and message that is not in line with the original vision—like a childhood game of "Telephone." But the second, and more interesting, reason for the shortage of storytellers is that the individuals who may have the skills to develop the story are not in the right environments.

Marty Cagan, a product management and product strategy expert, addresses this issue in his book Inspired: How To Create Products That Customers Love. Cagan notes that there are two key responsibilities of the product manager: "assess product opportunities, and define the product to be built." However, he asserts that product managers often become "consumed in the details and pressures of producing detailed specs rather than looking at the market opportunity and discovering a winning strategy and roadmap." The reason for this is that product management is often placed within the engineering organization. Ultimately, an engineering organization is focused on execution and that culture is not optimized for the process of discovery, curiosity, and play, all of which are fundamental to those who engage in storytelling.

Product storytellers should be at the intersection of product, marketing, and technology to help ensure that what's being created clearly maps back to a product story that identifies the plot, people, and perceived value to the consumer. Before a technologist writes a line of code, or a marketer writes a line of copy, or a designer creates a single wireframe or design, you have to establish the story that your product is going to tell.

The role of a product storyteller is not meant to take away from the founder, executive, marketer, designer, or technologist. As well, the development of product strategy and vision shouldn't be contained in a silo belonging to the product storyteller. But someone does need to own it. Now more than ever, cross-role collaboration is critical to product conception, incubation, and development. The product storyteller synthesizes rather than analyzes, sees the big picture rather than becoming stuck in the details, and ensures that all product interactions and touchpoints form a cohesive and value-based consumer experience.

So whether you are at a small start up or a large organization, whether you are a founder, executive, technologist, designer, manager, or marketer, ask yourself this: do you know your product's story? And perhaps more importantly, who creates your product story?

About the Author(s)

Sarah Doody is a NYC based user experience designer and product strategist. Sarah publishes a popular UX newsletter, The UX Notebook. Sign up for free at: www.theuxnotebook.com

She works with startups to help them launch their initial product as well helping companies already in market optimize their user experiences. She enjoys teaching about user experience, she co-developed and taught General Assembly's first 12 week UX course. Sarah can be reached on Twitter @sarahdoody.

Comments

April 15, 2011

Such an incredibly fascinating article for anyone interested in design and how we as humans interact with the products around us...I am going back to school this summer for Design Ethnography as i am interested in new ways to avoid "things getting lost in translation" between the consumer's needs and the final product but also within companies and their departments...I love the title of "product storyteller" - sounds so much more fun than being a "Design Ethnographer"...

I have been saying this for years. People will remember a story that resonates with them. This is the way I work for a nonprofit organization--I tell its story in a way that people will remember after they have moved on. There are stories they can pass on to others. Often, I see the story I wrote retold in another place, and it makes me feel good to know that the message is continuing to impact others.

I love this train of thought for a lot of reasons. My focus is on the entire customer experience, and too often the silos within organizations (or departments) really makes looking at this holistically painful. Your point about intersecting the various groups into a story is a great way to look at it. Too often, UX is seen as either "technical" or "creative" but not both - it has to work together to support the business and the customer to really create a great experience. Great post. Thanks!

Hi Brian!! I could not agree more. Brand and product need to co-exist, but more importantly co-create. And it's that element of co-creation that we need to work on more in businesses I think. You're right the inherent value of the consumer experience needs to embedded in every single element of the journey someone takes with your product / company / brand (whatever we'd like to call it!). That's why I think people who make great storytellers have to have some hybrid understanding of marketing / product / and a dash of technology ... but more importantly, the ability to foster collaboration between these groups.

Hi Mark!! In a start up, you're right. Ideally the founder has the vision and strategy. However, I think it's important that there be a secondary owner because as the company grows, sustaining that vision across all activities and teams will become difficult.

Hi Russ!! Wow I love this part of your comment "no need to focus on the details when that is others' jobs"!! The book my Marty Cagan is really fantastic, I highly recommend it. You can also follow him on Twitter @cagan.

Thanks for all the comments and feedback. Really appreciate your thoughts and ideas as we begin to explore the importance of storytelling in products and business.

Great post that hiring firms/people must read. Couldn't agree more with the PM comments -> if a PM is micromanaging the project then he/she really isn't a PM. A good PM needs to allow the team to be accountable and empowered. Too many people don't associate big picture people as good PMs (no need to focus on the details when that is other's jobs).

To the earlier comment, I don't think Zuck was the greatest storyteller but, luckily he had one of the best storytellers around in Sean Parker.

Really great post, I completely 'buy-in' to your argument that strong products - which are the basis of strong brands - must be able to tell a really compelling story to both the team that creates the product and the customer who will buy it about why it will make a difference in their lives.

My one quibble would be that in a start-up or small business, the CEO/Founder really should be the one who is the product storyteller. I think if they are not, then the company is probably in trouble from the start!

Thanks for this very informative post. What you call “product storytelling” is also part of brand strategy, and the function of “product storyteller” is usually performed by a brand strategist, or a brand developer. Just to clarify, the brand mission is to create the customers that drive the business forward. The process of “creating customers” involves leading customers on a brand journey that advances customers to richer realms of living. Customers need new perspectives and new experiences to discover these realms (through the product and the brand), hence the importance of storytelling.

Of course, by “storytelling” we don’t mean “spinning tales.” Storytelling is not promotion. It’s a shared story from a shared journey, co-created between the product and customers. In the best of stories, the company and its customers are on the same page, writing it together.

People often assume that brands are some kind of window dressing or meta context applied when a product is ready for market. Actually, the most critical brand decisions are made during product development. The brand is an application to create value that should be fully embedded into the product from the get-go. UX is a very big part of this value, of course. A brand developer should be working side-by-side with product developers to ensure that the chosen product strategy is also the best customer strategy.